Tuesday, July 25, 2017

Saturday
morning dawned cold and overcast, just like most early February
mornings in the Eifel Mountains. Gino Davis had joined the group and
was happily leading the way down the hill and past the Air Police
guardhouse as we walked along the two lane access road toward the
German Bus Stop out on highway B-51. Leonard, who organized the trip along with Mike Ammon, slipped to the rear of the group and let Gino lead the way. Gino was wearing white socks
with black pants and a day-glow green sweater. He proudly announced
to the world the Americans were coming.

The
bus stop was almost half a mile walk from the gate at Bitburg Air Base and by the time we got there I
was almost cold enough to abandon the trip. No, not really, I was excited about what
lay ahead. Soon one of the big, lumbering yellow
Mercedes diesel buses from the Deutsche Bundespost pulled off the busy highway into our bus stop. After someone, I don't know who,
communicated to the driver we wanted to go to the Trier train
station, we all dug out the right combination of Deutschmarks, and
deposited them in the coin box.

"Almost
like home" I thought as I fingered the Marks, about the
same size and weight as a quarter. Then I looked up at the
passengers, most of the men wearing fedora hats, and many of the
older women with "babushka" type scarves, all staring at
our group boarding the bus and thought, "Oh, no, no it isn't!"

It was
apparent we were as much a novelty tocurious passengers as they were to us. They
saw Americans all the time, some of them even worked on base or in
the housing area, but usually only one or two "Amis" would
get on the bus at once, and not all carrying duffel bags. We
were being whispered about as we lurched toward the rear of the bus,
looking for empty seats. There were eight of us, including Hank, one
of my friends from the guidance shop, and some others I didn't really
know. We ended up scattered around the bus, somehow concerned we
would get separated and not make the journey to Luxembourg, wherever
that was.

The
bus stopped at several more villages on the sixteen-mile trip through
the wooded countryside, picking up occasional riders. The ride down
the hill overlooking the Mosel Valley and the city of Trier was one
I'll always remember. The beauty of the German countryside never
fails to impress me. We crossed over the Mosel River and soon swung
into the open-air bus station, filled with buses and people. When the bus came to a halt in the busy bus terminal in Trier, everyone else got off, so we did, too.Someone had a city map of Trier, I think
it was Leonard's, and we made a command decision to walk through the
Markt Platz and head toward Germany's oldest building, the Roman
"Black Gate," the Porta Nigra. We stood at the Porta Nigra
and several of us took photos like any tourist. I didn't have a camera, and most of
the others couldn't afford color film. A lot of GI photos of Europe back then were shot in black and white.

Porta Nigra, Trier, Germany

We referred to the priceless map and struck off
in what we thought was the direction of the train station. At first
it was fun, goofing along and making mental notes about all of our
observations of German civilization. It was apparent we weren't going to find any train station when we were
almost out of town. Leonard stopped a passerby, who didn't speak
English, but by pointing at the map and making simple hand gestures
we gathered we had gone the wrong way from the Porta Nigra. We
trudged the long walk back to the massive stonework and turned left,
walking down a beautiful, tree lined boulevard. By the time we got
to another bus station located just this side of the train station,
we were no longer kidding around about being lost. One of the buses
coming out of the train station had Bitburg lit up as a destination.
It may have been the same bus we had ridden into town.

We
stood in the huge, tile-floor train station entrance and tried to figure
out where to get train information and buy tickets. Leonard and Mike
were the ones who knew what they wanted, so while we waited alongside
the ticket window, the young clerk, who spoke broken English,
collected money from an assortment of hands and passed back eight,
small train tickets. We
looked at the tickets as if they were a joke. The train tickets were
about the size of an American movie ticket, but made out of thick
cardboard, like being cut out of a cardboard box. It was green with
a red strip through it. I thought it would make a great souvenir
someday.

"I'm
famished!", exclaimed Gino, "Let's get something to eat
before we go out to the platform. We have twenty minutes before the
train comes."

We
followed Gino into the train station's tile-walled restaurant and
ended up all at the same table, pulling empty chairs from nearby
tables. We got some strange looks, apparently we were out of order. Everything on the menu looked
expensive. My first lesson in not eating at train stations.

Gino
said to the standoffish waiter, "I'll have the Tagesuppe"

The rest of us ordered open face sandwiches, and of course, draught
beer. When we asked Gino what "Tagesuppe" was, he informed
us he had a bowl of it before and thought it was delicious. When the
waiter brought Gino a soup bowl with what appeared to be broth with a
raw egg floating in it, we thought his eyes were stuck open.

"Entshuldigung…,"
Gino said to the waiter, "What is this?"

The
waiter never blinked as he turned and said, "That is the “soup
of the day,” just as you ordered."

No
one said a word as Gino stared at soup bowl, then slowly picked up
his spoon, then repeatedly bashed the hell out of the egg.

Our
open-faced sandwiches and beer were served and we were getting back
into the spirit of our adventure when, needless to say, someone
noticed we had a minute to catch the train. We rushed en masse to the
pedestrian tunnel that led to the platform to catch our train. It
took two minutes to get to the loading platform, and we watched as
our train slowly pulled out of the station in front of us.

"Now
what?," I asked, "Should we go back to the ticket seller or
can we just get on the next train?"

"Let's
make sure," said Leonard, "Let's go back and check to be
safe."

The
ticket agent was less than pleased with us. We were taking up space
in his line and he really didn't like the extra aggravation we were
causing. He had to go and find the Bahnhof Meister, a figure who
turned out to be as imposing as his title.

The
Bahnhof Meister was a big, barrel chested man in his early fifties.
He wore a full, dark blue dress uniform, complete with a red leather
belt across his tunic and an imposing, official looking hat that
might have been worn by an old Field Marshall. He was an imposing
figure with absolutely no sense of humor.

He
had to sign each one of our tickets on the back to show they were
still valid. There wasn't enough room on the tickets to write with
much flair. He gruffly spoke to us, without a single indication we
were all from the same planet. He turned and pointed at the train
board, showing us when and where the next train to Luxembourg would
arrive. We had about twenty minutes and decided not to screw up
again. We walked up to the platform and plopped our bags down and
waited.

In
exactly nineteen and a half minutes, a passenger train quietly pulled
in on the track behind us. We turned around and watched as people
boarded, and within a minute it was underway, heading out of the
station. There were no indications of any train any where near our
track.

The
Bahnhof Meister soon strode out to the platform outside his office
and bellowed in German loud enough to be heard all the way back in
Bitburg. His face was as red as his belt. We knew what he was
saying even though we didn't speak a word of German. We had missed
the train yet again! We were waiting by the wrong track and we hadn't
understood the blaring loudspeaker. We had just stood there like
fence posts while the loudspeakers tried to tell us the train was
behind us! We were marched once again into his tiny office. He made
us sit down, not letting any one of us out of his sight. He had
finally filled in every open space on the back of the tickets, and he
wasn't taking any chances he'd have to issue new tickets. It was
like writing your telephone number on a matchbook match after someone
else had already written theirs. He was silent as he rocked back and
forth in his chair, watching the clock on the wall. It was not a
rocking chair. Every once in a while he would scowl at us, then turn
back and look at the clock.

Finally,
he stood up and said, "Los!" and strode out of the office.
We followed along as he marched to the platform. The train pulled in
and stopped with a coach door inches from our feet. The Bahnhof
Meister stood stiffly and waited while we boarded the train. The
train was slowly rolling before he turned on his heel and strode back
into his office.

Leonard,
leaning back to look out the coach window said, "Want to bet
he's headed for a schnapps?"

The
train we boarded was headed from Copenhagen to Paris. Like the bus
ride earlier, there weren't many empty seats. Most of the sofa-style,
leather covered seats had people sprawled out, scattered around the
car. The compartments were just like in the movies, except not as
plush. These were the "B" coaches and they were mostly
filled. Hank and I found a couple of seats together, but I think
Leonard was carefully looking for a good-looking seating partner. I
decided that was only in the movies, too, looking at the mostly
tired, unhappy looking travelers who mostly didn't even bother to
look up.

Soon
after leaving Trier, the train crossed over the Mosel and headed
southwest toward Wasserbillig, just over the Luxembourg border. We
stopped not ten minutes out of Trier while the German locomotive
dropped off and was replaced by a Luxembourg diesel. After a few
moments we were under way again, and before we could really get
settled in, we were pulling into the main train station in the city
of Luxembourg. The two cities are less than thirty miles apart.

Surprise!
You needed your ticket to get off the train! They don't do this in
the movies! Luckily we all scrounged up our mutilated tickets and
turned them over to the bemused Luxembourg agents who soon start
chatting and laughing among themselves. I wondered what the Bahnhof
Meister wrote in that small space.

Saturday, July 22, 2017

Florida Weekly Newspaper runs an annual writing contest based on a random photograph they post as an inspiration. I had one of my writings published several years ago (See my blog "Stuff") based on a photo of a doll in a basket on a staircase. This years photo is an open, European window, which immediately flooded me with memories. This is the result.

* * * * *

The photograph in the Florida Weekly
immediately flooded me with nostalgia. There is no hope a memoir will
ever make it through the gauntlet of astute critics who judge the
writing contest, but perhaps I will find a glimmer of understanding
when I explain why a photograph of an open, European style window,
overlooking a courtyard or narrow street, a scene that most of us
have only seen in movies, brings tears to my eyes: A friend of mine
fell out of one. He did it backwards, and with his pants down around
his ankles.

Nostalgia, by Internet definition, is
“a
sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past.” Aah, the
unrecoverable past. That period when you alone remember exactly what
happened. Even those with you at the time may not share your
nostalgia, such as Tom’s recollection of landing on a stack of
trash cans in the alley behind the Flamingo Bar in Luxembourg.

“Parlez-vous français?” asked the
gendarme, staring down at the semi-conscious, intoxicated young
American tangled up among the trash cans. Tom had no idea which
country he was in. After all, he arrived in Germany from the United
States only that morning and never before heard of Luxembourg. It was
also the first time in his life he was legally old enough to drink.

Frank and I also had a problem. We had
driven Tom and five other newly arrived airmen to Luxembourg from
nearby Bitburg Air Base in Germany for their introduction to the
night clubs which surrounded the main train station in Luxembourg
City. They’re all closed now, with the changing times of finance
and world respect, but in those days, they were a right of passage
for many young American servicemen. Tom’s marvelous adventure
started without us, and that was a problem.

We were official sponsors for the new
arrivals from stateside, all recent graduates of technical school.
Our duties included walking them through the procedures of arriving
at their new assignment. After myriad sign-ins and drawing their
bedding and equipment, assigning them rooms and bunks, getting their
paper work squared away, as soon as Retreat, the bugle call played on
the base loudspeakers to signal the end of duty day, blared across
the base, we became “unofficial” sponsors, and our duties
changed.

“Who
wants to go to Lux for a drink and a chance to meet a French girl?”
was the question. The response that night was unanimous. Back then,
before European Union, the border crossing at Echternach was at a
two-lane, stone bridge, with an old fashioned red and white cross bar
that had to be quaintly raised and lowered for each car. Today, you
zip across the autobahn bridge high above the town and the Sauer
River and don’t realize you’ve crossed a border. But, in those
days we had to stop and show our military identification cards,
before we were given the priceless, limp wave of the hand that said,
“Oh, you again. Go ahead, go ahead!”

Us old guys would sit and drink the
fifteen cent beer while the new guys ran around like, well, kids in a
candy store. After half an hour or so, we realized Tom had gone to
the toilette and had not returned. It got very serious quickly as we
had the owners search for our missing ward to no avail. He had
disappeared into thin air! To make matters worse, the bars closed
exactly at midnight.

The gendarmes walked in at closing
time. “Allez!” they said, and we found ourselves standing in the
dimly lit street wondering what to do next. We split into teams,
slowly driving around, looking in vain through the oddly yellow-lit
streets. Soon, Frank said, “Let me head back to base. I’m almost
out of gas.!”

Federal prison crossed my mind as I
finally headed across the tranquil Luxembourg countryside headed back
to Bitburg. Court martial was obviously unavoidable.

Frank ran toward me as I walked into
the four-story barracks. “He’s here! Tom is here!” We ran to
the fourth floor, where Tom was snoring in his bunk. We dumped him on
the floor and demanded an explanation.

“The
Luxembourg police drove me to the border crossing, flagged down the
first car headed to Bitburg, and put me in it! The driver dropped me
off in front of the barracks.”

“What
were you doing sitting in the window?” We asked.

“Well,
I wasn’t going to get one of those diseases from the toilet seat!”
he said.

Wednesday, May 17, 2017

I’m
a genius! I know because I just took a test on Face Book and they told
me so!

The
post in my feed said, “Only a genius can see the hidden figure!”
then showed a number written in salmon colored, globule style patches
on a speckled green background. I saw it immediately, so, to
establish my undoubted intellectual superiority over those who couldn’t see the number, I quickly clicked on the link,
and lo and behold, the genius that I must be, I got sucked down the
rabbit hole of click-bait.

Oh,
not the insidious ads that pop up on your screen every search you do,
magically presenting your old searches so you can’t possibly
continue without some interaction on my part. You know, like clicking
on whatever pops up just to see what colors they have. No. I’m
talking about click bait. Those are the feeds and sidebars that catch
your eye that usually state, “You won’t believe what...”
followed by something based on your past searches. Or the other perennial favorite,"Thirty-seven images you won't believe..."

Trust me, ain’t
nothing accidental in the Internet wonderland.

One
of the most common bait for clicktraps is the fourth grade English
test passed off as “Only one in 100 can pass this test!” then
they give you a sentence where their, they’re or there is the
proper answer to a meaningless question. I always love to see tests I
had to pass to get into Junior High School being passed off as
intellectual prowess! Good ol’ Southwest High School. Or was it
West Miami Jr High? Maybe it was Olympia Heights elementary! I
remember Mr. White in sixth grade explaining gerunds, and Mrs.
Saunders in tenth grade trying to unravel the three year reign of
confusion with a frustrating but memorable lesson on present
participles.

Amazing,
I can conjugate a verb – within reason – and always remember
loose with two “Ohs” is the opposite of tight! Hey, I nail quite
a few of those tests, and even share the results with thousands and
thousands of new fans around the world.

“Clickbait-
is a pejorative term
for web content that is aimed at generating online
advertising revenue, especially at the expense of quality or
accuracy, relying on sensationalist headlines or
eye-catching thumbnail pictures to
attract click-throughs and to encourage forwarding of the
material over online social networks.[ Clickbait headlines
typically aim to exploit the "curiosity gap", providing
just enough information to make readers curious, but not enough
to satisfy their curiosity without clicking through to the linked
content.”

"From a
historical perspective, the techniques employed by clickbait authors
can be considered derivative of yellow journalism, which
presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead
uses eye-catching headlines that include exaggerations of
news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism”

My
very favorite click-bait, though is the first one, where color vision
is misrepresented to represent intelligence instead of visual acuity.
Since – or is it sense – I have 100 percent color accuracy, I got
to twist wires together for the Air Force and later a computer
manufacturing company that no longer needs people like me since they
no longer make computers.

Regardless
– or is it irregardless, since that strange aberration has now
been added to Webster’s Dictionary as a real word – geniuses with
my native ability have been relegated to taking meaningless tests on
Face book and supplying data mining companies around the world of our
likes and dislikes, much less our friend’s lists and all their –
or is it they’re? - contact info.

Thursday, March 30, 2017

My mom got me interested in leisure cruising at the beginning of the fledgling industry. Not the port-of-call cruising made famous in the movies of the pre-World War II era, where ships sailed from New York to London or Honolulu to Hong Kong. Those transoceanic cruises may still exist today, but the world of cruising was forever altered by Knut Kloster and Ted Arison in Miami. Their first ship, a converted car ferry, the M/S Sunward, started an entire industry.

The Port of Miami was a commercial port back then, before the basin cruise industry was created, revolutionizing more than just Miami or a way of vacationing. The Dodge Island passenger terminal construction project was well underway when I shipped a Volkswagen from Antwerp to the P&O dock at Pier 2 in 1965,but it would still be a year before Norwegian Caribbean Line initiated their first cruises from the new Port of Miami. There was no terminal dedicated just for passenger ships then, just a working port that butted up against Bayfront Park and shared space with local charter deep-sea fishing boats and freighters of all shapes and sizes headed to and from ports all over the Caribbean.

With the allure of the exotic, nearby Bahamas - which incidentally supplied almost all of the ships with waiters, maids, cooks and just about every non-officer position - Miami was the perfect place to initiate a three or four day leisure cruise. Miami had a huge para-mutual market that enticed tourist dollars during the "season," or winter months, from horse tracks such as Tropical Park, Hialeah, and Gulfstream, and the many dog tracks and Jai Alai frontons that tourists loved. But, while the glamorous hotels on Miami Beach may have had Sinatra or Sammy Davis, Jr, they didn't have casino gambling.The new cruise ships supplied the missing piece as soon as they passed outside the twelve-mile U.S. territorial boundary headed on their easy going, laid back trip to Nassau or Freeport. Croupiers pulled the velvet covers off the roulette wheels and dealers broke open new decks of cards in the ship's casinos as the ship cleared the imaginary line. The one-arm bandits, the slot machines, were swarmed as the crowds poured in for Las Vegas style gambling and Miami Beach had new competition for tourist dollars at a level they couldn't handle.

A Chalks' seaplane takes off in front of the M/S Starward in Government Cut, Miami, 1969

Drinks were cheap - the cruise lines paid no alcohol taxes as they didn't buy it in the U.S. - and the food was outstanding. Word spread quickly and cruising began to find a dedicated following.

My mother was Executive Housekeeper for the Lindsey Hopkins Vocational School hotel, part of the Dade County school system in 1969. The school hotel was nationally renowned for the staff and students it produced, and Norwegian Caribbean Cruise Line approached Dade County Schools to have a hotel housekeeping instructor teach on-board classes to the ship’s staff about hotel housekeeping.

That instructor on several cruises was my mom, accompanied by my dad, who dutifully inspected the quality of the bar stock. The photos they brought back had always been in the back of my mind, and when my wife and I finally got to take our first cruise some twenty years later, a three day weekend cruise to Nassau, also aboard an NCL ship, the M/S Sunward II, we were hooked.

I still have the M/S Sunward's original ship's memento plate from my mom's teaching cruise mounted on the wall in my office.